Your Voice in My Head (4 page)

This makes me sadder than anything I’ve ever heard.

I go to a soul-food restaurant called the Pink Tea Cup at night to fill the hours I’m awake, so I won’t feel lonely. I eat pecan pancakes. Breakfast all day is like hope. A fresh start at midnight. The jukebox is amazing and I come to know which are the longest songs available for my quarter. It has Roy Ayers’s “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” Donny Hathaway’s cover of “Jealous Guy,” “Living for the City” by Stevie Wonder. It’s a freezing February. The night-shift cook and the waitress at the Pink Tea Cup let me join their game of Boggle.

I think the fact that New York has numbered streets keeps me alive for a long time. Just keep walking. Just keep moving. As much as I cut myself, there is also pain and achievement, elation, of course, in pounding the pavement. 11th to 86th. 1st Ave. to 10th.

I listen to “The River” by Bruce Springsteen, over and over. I think of Ophelia. I can feel the weight of her soaking clothes with every step.

Mania flows like a river approaching a waterfall. Depression is a stagnant lake. There are dead things floating and the water has the same blue-black tinge as your lips. You stay completely still because you’re so afraid of what is brushing your leg (even though it could be nothing because your mind is already gone). That’s why you lie in your bed (in the center, with my dark blue sheets. The silver curtains are a nod to mania. They were something that seemed like a good idea at the time). My bras are hung on the wall behind my bed, crucified for my sins. I have thirty-six bras. I counted. I hold my hands over my breasts in my days and weeks and months in bed, as if someone might steal them.

Though I don’t even live in a one-bed (I live in a studio; it has a wall built through the center to give the illusion of two rooms), I take a roommate. I don’t remember why I take a roommate. Maybe I know I should be watched. But she is very rarely there because her life is so full. She is always busy being free.

Another English girl in New York, she has a signature hairdo (bleached white-blond piled on top of her head) and a catchphrase (“Love it!”). Her curiosities are all over my apartment. Incredibly expensive shoes. A hot pink inflatable guitar. Handbags to fit a Mary Poppins coat stand inside.

I am very, very thin. I soon find that when I no longer have to dress to flatter my curves, I wear turquoise leopard-print tights under a pajama romper, with high-top Converse, or tights with thigh-high stockings with denim cutoffs and ballet slippers that have Smiths lyrics scrawled on them. People stop me in the street. For the first time in my life, I am fashionable.

Then, a couple of things happen. Skateboard Peter is not there to kill a water bug. Pounding the pavement looking for him, I run into a writer I admire who has enthusiastically blurbed my book. “Hey, I’m Emma Forrest.”

“Oh, hey, Emma.”

“Thanks for the blurb.”

“I really liked the book.”

I pause. “Can you come upstairs and kill a water bug for me?”

He looks at me like I am a water bug. “No.”

“No?”

“
No
. I’m not getting involved in your life.”

Then a girlfriend takes me to the movies, bringing along the paralyzingly shy comedian Garry Shandling. Afterwards I notice his shoelaces are untied. My focus is off everywhere, looking at the corners of people, not their eyes. Sometimes their mouths. With sadness comes a staring problem. Without saying a word to him, I bend to tie his shoelaces. Laces tied, he runs away, fast. My friend is upset. I am so crazy, I am crazier than a comedian.

The third thing that happens is I run into Sam, a friend of a friend who has wanted me forever. I wasn’t really interested and I had a boyfriend. Now I have no boyfriend and I go to parties alone. I tell him I am single. “So you can kiss me.”

“No, thanks,” he answers. He looks at me and then at the floor. “I don’t want to anymore.”

Fourth and final, I go to see
Ghost Dog
, the Jim Jarmusch film about an urban samurai, starring Forest Whitaker. Only I would allow Forest Whitaker to take such a pivotal
role in my decision to die. When he wins his Oscar many years later, I say to the screen, “I want the seven grand you made me lose to St. Vincent’s Hospital, you bastard!”

Do not try to kill yourself without insurance, because if you survive, you will be in so much debt, you will want to die. This becomes a big deal with Dr. R. Because of what I have done, I cannot afford to see him. He drops his fee and keeps it there until the very last year of our sessions.

Before my suicide note, there is a pre-suicide note, an aperitif if you will. I send my dad a strip of photobooth portraits stuck to a piece of paper that says “Emma loves Daddy.”

I have no memory of sending it.

Dad’s response arrives after I’m out of hospital, sent before he knew I was headed there. He photocopies the picture and then turns the photos upside down and draws himself—his beard, his bald head—onto my face, adding: “And Daddy loves Emma.”

I FIRST THOUGHT OF IT
at thirteen. We had a large bathroom with a wall-to-wall mural of peacocks and birds of paradise, jungle birds and tall grass, inspired by Gauguin. I also had a mural in my bedroom: my dad had helped me paint in huge letters on my wall: D.A.I.S.Y., which stood for Da Inner Sound Y’all, the motto of the hip-hop group De La Soul, the first band I loved. They had a skit at the start of their album
3 Feet High and Rising
with a fake game-show host asking a fake game-show audience nonsense questions: “How many feathers are on a Perdue chicken?” “How many fibers are intertwined on a shredded wheat biscuit?” “What does toosh et leh leh pu mean?” “How many times did the Batmobile catch a flat?” “We’ll let the contestants think it over and we’ll return right after these messages!”

Because of the glorious mural, the bathroom became more of a family hangout than the living room. Many conversations took place whilst Dad was in the bathtub, bubbles and a fancy newspaper holder covering his dignity as
he read the
Independent
. Mum would be at the mirror using what looked like a heated light saber to turn her head of curls from wee ethnic ringlets to chubby glamour rolls. Lisa would be stalking the room, saying “It’s not
fair!
It’s not
fair!”
because, even though she was nine, she functioned primarily as Guardian of Justice. I remember, in the bathroom, at far too late an age, eating a bar of soap in the shape of
The Muppet Show
’s Fozzie Bear, because I loved him and so I wanted to consume him, even if it made me ill. I didn’t yet know the word “foreshadowing.”

It was in the sacred family meeting place that I one day turned the brass key in the door and climbed up onto a chair to reach the shelf in the wooden cabinet that held Mum’s Valium. Staying balanced on the chair, I tipped out the pills and held them in my hand, weighed them, as if they had wisdom to impart. I couldn’t hear them speak, so I put six of them on my tongue and held them there, waiting for the message. Didn’t swallow, but waited to die, or to half die, for a few minutes. I didn’t die. I spat them out. I put them back in the bottle. Replaced the cap. Gingerly turned the key. And went downstairs for dinner.

It’s almost always pills with women. It’s a gentle seeping out women seek, like on a classic soul record, when the volume on Otis Redding just slowly gets turned down until he’s gone. What happens after the fade-out? What are the musicians doing now in that room?
Take me there. Take me there
.

MANHATTAN BEARING DOWN ON ME
, I walk home from
Ghost Dog
, hand in hand with the thought of suicide. The thought of suicide is masculine energy, with manicured nails, like a mafioso. It wears a warm jacket that it drapes across my shoulders, and it doesn’t feel the cold itself. Do you remember the scene in
Goodfellas
where Robert De Niro keeps telling Lorraine Bracco, “There’s a dress for you in that warehouse room. That one. Go on. Just go in there”? And she knows she’s about to be killed, so she doesn’t go in there? The thought of suicide tricks you in there with sweet talk, and even though you know you’re being sweet-talked, and you know what lies in store for you, it’s a room you want to go to anyway.

The well-groomed Thought of Suicide holds the door to my building for me. In the warmth of my apartment, we pick up my razor and cut together, like taking friendly shots in a bar.
L’chaim!
I look again and TOS is a manager taking me through important documents as I draw the blood from
my skin with a razor pen. “Sign here. And here. And once more, here.”

The Thought of Suicide is a big flatterer. “You’re very pretty,” it says, and I blush but I also believe it, the light of the thought bleaching out my imperfections. Later GH will say, “You’re a great shag and very beautiful, but you don’t care about such things,” and internally I laugh and laugh because I think it is my vanity the Thought of Suicide played hardest on.

I lie down on the bed. There are papers all over the queen-size mattress, books, newspapers, a bottle of water, pills. Pills tucked in there already, just waiting, just more. The pills begin to kick in. This is very pleasant, I think, like the moment you step into a warm bath, or the moment he slides inside you for the first time.

And then the tide pulls back and there are things on the seabed I didn’t know were there: rusty cans, empty Coke bottles, seabirds choked in plastic. And it isn’t pleasant anymore.

Somewhere in there is a bell, maybe a child playing a triangle. I reach for the triangle to make it stop. It’s the phone. “Hello,” I say from the ocean.

It’s my mother. “Emma? Emma? EMMA! What have you done?”

How does she call an ambulance? She doesn’t. I have dropped the phone and wandered into the suitcase to pass out and am now unconscious. She hears my roommate walk in. Mum is still there and hears everything. She hears my roommate scream. She hears her call 911 on her cell. She hears the ambulance men arrive. She stays there. She doesn’t go anywhere. My mum is here with me, for all of it.

Eventually she hangs up to book a ticket so she can fly to be with me that evening. She flies through the night and I fly through the night and the next day we are in a hospital room together. I peel open my sticky lids. An IV leads from my arm to a drip. I’m in a bed and she’s on a chair and there’s someone else there with us—suicide watch—is it the Haitian or is it the drunken volunteer nun those first hours?

E-mail to Dad from Mum:

Whilst the hospital keeps me, friendless Karen takes Mum to dinner at the Pink Tea Cup. I know Karen is grateful to be of service. She is like someone who loves fire, helping to put out a fire.

FOR A FEW DAYS
after I’m out of the hospital, I’m completely lucid. I’m cheeky and brimming with joie de vivre. It’s not gratitude. I have successfully altered my mood. For a spell.

SB and Teeter stick by me. But I lose a number of friends over the suicide attempt.

“It’s understandable,” says Dr. R. “They’re frightened. It’s a frightening thing to do.”

I
don’t understand why I’ve been disinvited from parties. I am not seeing the big picture.

Afterwards, you can’t just fall back into life like someone appearing at the door wearing a monocle and top hat, saying, “Hullo! I was just in the neighborhood following my failed suicide attempt and I thought I might stop in for a cocktail!”

“Are you surprised that people might not want to see you?” Dr. R asks me.

“I think they’re jealous. It’s something they’ve thought about. But I did it.”

“This isn’t exactly an achievement.”

“No. I failed.”

The ones who use the suicide to draw closer are loners on the edge, peering from their abyss into yours. Karen calls constantly.

Dr. R wants to send me to Silver Hill, the Connecticut rehab/psych facility. But being one of America’s forty-four million uninsured, I can’t cover the thirty grand. If we go for an assessment and they deem me a danger to myself they will commit me anyway and I will have to find the thirty grand or face legal action. We decide to go back to London, although there really isn’t any decision; Britain’s National Health Service is the only option.

I think this should be the new campaign of the British Tourist Board: “England: when it’s the only option.”

Mum goes ahead of me to look into available treatment in the land of “Oh, do pull your socks up!”

I arrive at the airport with hand luggage. My parents aren’t there. Dad has made them late, because he is afraid, Mum thinks. So there I am waiting at Heathrow arrivals, no idea where my family is, and I can’t remember how to use a pay phone. I don’t understand English money anymore. I can’t remember my parents’ phone number. I sit on the floor of the airport and cry. Crying makes the cuts on my neck swell. When my parents arrive, my dad is chastened. He can’t look at me.